Discover the rich event communication that is available in every Sencha Touch component, allowing you to quickly respond to your users and create intuitive, native-quality applications

Completely control the look of your application with Sencha Touch themes and styling options.

Quickly put together simple components backed by the data package

Allow your users to store information with forms, or access remote information from other services like Google maps and Flickr

Learn about web storage features to store data offline, or communicate with online databases for richer storage options.

Explore expert topics like syncing data and compiling applications for sale on an App store.

My review

++ Easy accessible

The entry level is low, somebody with a general idea about touch devices and having some HTML/CSS skills, preferably also some knowledge of Javascript, can jump in with great ease.

++ Clear and concise explanations

The explanations and code examples were comprehensive and well structured (one caveat with the code, see further down). Especially Chapter 8 was useful: it combined the concepts building a Flickr Finder app – cool.

++ Wide range of technologies make it an interesting read

Apart from Sencha Touch a lot of other technologies are introduced like writing CSS with SASS, the Safari Error console, REST / building an API and AJAX, PhoneGap/ NimbleKit, working in offline mode. I liked this, it gives you some relevant context you need as a developer.

Here is where the book lost a bit my appetite. It uses Sencha Touch 1.1.0 and this is not the latest release. Release 2.x is out and contains important changes. The Sencha Touch 2 Developer Preview was already presented in October last year, yet this book came out if February 2012. I don’t understand it doesn’t take a sneak preview at least as the Facebook graph title I reviewed did with the Open Graph that was even fresher when that book was released.

I noted that when I loaded the 2.x library files into the 1.1.0 code examples things started to fail. This demotivated me a bit because I didn’t see any use in trying examples of an older release especially knowing that performance was the key improvement between 1.x and 2.x. I guess this is inherent to writing a book about any software topic, but I had expected a bit more here, knowing that Packt books are heavily focussed on practical code samples.

++ Overall: good book

That aside, as I already stated the material was presented in a clear and wide scope. It was an interesting and joyful ride to get familiar with the Sencha Touch framework. After reading I can clearly see this is a good approach to mobile web development. I am looking forward to dive into the release 2 documentation soon to actually build something myself.

More info

You can read more about the book here. Please let me know in the comments if you have any experience and/or example apps built with Sencha Touch.

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